Teaching
Lecturer
University of California, Berkeley
Vertebrate Natural History, IB104
This course consists of three parts: lecture, lab and field trips. The material covers the evolution and ecology of vertebrates (not including fishes) with an emphasis on Californian diversity. Students learn distinguishing features of species and the roles that history and adaptation play in shaping those features.
Course development
University of California, Berkeley
I developed this course because I realized many students in introductory biology were bored in the labs. I greatly extended the curricula of the lab section (students now get extra units for the field section) to include semester long research projects that range from population ecology of small mammals, desert food web ecology (using isotopes), intertidal community ecology, foraging behavior in humming birds and lizards, and many other projects. This course continues to be one of the most popular undergraduate courses in the Department of Integrative Biology.
Graduate Student Instructor
Introductory Biology (IB 1B)
Population and Community Ecology (IB 153)
Upper division seminars in Conservation and Amphibian Ecology (IB 298)
One of these seminars produced the first version of the online amphibian conservation bioinformatics site AmphibiaWeb.
AmphibiaWeb now receives an average of over 4,600 queries a day that result in returns for users interested in everything from amphibian biodiversity to conservation and possible threats to endangered species. One of my favorite aspects of the site is to search for all the known species of amphibians by country or by state in the United States. All you have to do is click on regional and worldwide maps and our database returns a list of species and available data such as species accounts, photographs, range maps, and threat category.
